Friday, March 6, 2009

They're all smiling because they saved a bunch of money on Geico and oh yeah, free pork.

So, yours truly has been doing some fun events the last few months and making cakes and pastries of all things. On Tuesday, I assisted my former chef and current 4505 Meat's founder Ryan Farr at a butcher and grilling event for Yelp Elite at the new bar Bloodhound. We also had Taylor and Bailey from Fatted Calf on hand, who were rocking the charcoal grill and meat slicer stations. It was a pretty fun event overall, but the booze was gone by night's end and I wasn't really going to cut meat for most of the night partially buzzed. My hand almost got taken off a few times from rabid meat eating mother-Yelpers, but it happens. Even pigs can't resist pork(see previous post). Those who stayed just a bit longer after cleanup got a chance to snag some of the loin roasted to perfection. Git'er dun.

For some heads up on the info for more meat goodies:

Ryan Farr's new venture 4505 Meats can be found at http://www.4505meats.com/.His badass Chicharrones can be found at CoffeeBar and Elixir in SF currently and has been featured on SF Magazine here.

And Taylor's operation can be normally found at the Ferry Building Farmer's Market on Saturday as well as other locations. Check out http://www.fattedcalf.com/ for more info.

Last night's theme for Wednesday Night Test kitchen was chocolate. Why did I up and decide to make savory dishes and sauces with chocolate? I have no clue. I've had a few 100% quality cocoa bars sitting in my pantry shelf recently and it seemed to stare at me this week, so I thought, "what the hell." There were however a couple of rules: no dessert and no mole (meaning no chilis). After all, nothing is fun and discovered unless you cook without absolute abandon.So throughout the weekend, I was trying to toy with the idea of possibly playing on a combination of cocoa and black sesame paste. I came up with a few ideas and I just ended up incorporating them into a sesame chocolate master sauce of sorts and then testing two different flavors with that: one with crazy Asian flavors and the other more conventional common chocolate accompaniments.The other dish, a chocolate cassoulet (chocolate pork and beans) was a result of soaking too many butter beans a day ago. As a result, I looked at the pork I had and the beans and put 1+1 together. There was nothing standing in my way of Pork + Beans Cassoulet except for the fact that I wasn't too stoked about a stock based cassoulet with chocolate (would taste pretty odd) added, so I thought I'd make it kind of baked beans American style over a claypot (so technically still a cassoulet for you purists).

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Apparently there was a farmer-chef speed dating event going on at Bardiva a few weeks ago in late February. Pictures seen here. I hadn't caught wind of this until someone mentioned this to me after seeing it on Food and Wine's blog. Apparently, chefs talk to farmers about their product and see if they fall in love with it. I thought the idea was ingenious. Especially the part where as a chef, I don't need to worry about rejection. It's pretty much, "yeah, I like what you're selling," and off to bed we go - multiple partners are A-OK. That's a win win situation right there.

I found the Bourdain Food Porn episodes on Youtube. Part 2 of 5 is totally my favorite. You can go to youtube and watch the rest. This is one of my favorite episodes, so enjoy. More good food porn to report later...

"As the high-end magazines try to survive a shaky 2009, it is out with the truffles, in with the button mushrooms.

'There are ways in which we feel it should change,' said Dana Cowin, the editor in chief of Food & Wine, published by American Express Publishing. 'We don’t, for example, do recipes that involve loads of foie gras and shavings of truffles.'"

How can I express to you how wrong this is? Food magazines are the first and (for many) still one of the foremost choices for food porn in this country. I mean, we must be honest with ourselves here, most people in America are ridiculously bad cooks and many of the recipes on these magazines normally come out completely wrong or horribly mutated in the hands of these bad cooks anyways. Look, everyone's struggling, but this is the equivalent of Playboy deciding to roll with Team C or Team D in the looks department for their monthly spread and that damn-well is not going to fly. And don't give me crap about reading the recipes and articles, because that's a blatant lie for any general public magazine not named The New Yorker. How stupid does, "hey, I picked up this Maxim with Megan Fox on the cover for the in depth analysis of the stimulus package," sound to you? There are standards that must be met and this is not the way to do it. Foie should be every bit as prominent as potato.

Honestly, once they go down this route, the only refuge is the world of food porn blogging. More love for me, I guess. Screw it, I'm saving my nickels and having a foie feast, that will show them. This is another kick in the pants for the struggling art of publications, newspapers and magazines. Next thing you know, we'll be reading pedestrian filler articles from the NY Times about something stupid like deleting "friends" from Facebook... wait.